


Like a lover, like a stranger

by BIFF1



Series: RAREPAIR WEEK 2K16 [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Rarepair Week 2k16, Snowed In, Time Travel, but also post legends, killerwave, pre-legends, time travel gets confusing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 02:14:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5649898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BIFF1/pseuds/BIFF1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I knew that loving a time traveller was going to get complicated." She mostly tells herself but the words hit something hard in his core and pulls him, "I never know which you you are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a lover, like a stranger

"It won't work." Her voice was tired and thin behind him as he stared out at the wall of white. 

 

He had his gun pointed at the packed snow, he wasn't going to stay another minute in this tiny cottage. Not with her, not with anyone. He didn't like the cold and it was seeping into his bones, and he certainly didn't like being trapped.

 

It reminded him of the freezer.

 

Mick shook his head, and directed a blast of flame at the packed snow.

 

He watched triumphantly as it started to melt away into water, into stea- wait.

 

Normally it would have melted to the point of steam, just boil it away but, this, this wasn't, it was refreezing too quickly. What the hell kind of weather was this?! Fucking Mardon.

 

"I told you." Her voice grated on his nerves and he turned on her, slamming the door closed, he didn't want to look at that ice any more.

 

She sat in front of a fire watching him with harsh dark eyes. There was blood on the front of her pale dress, his, and it made her look far too attractive for someone he wanted to be mad at.

  

"Well what do you want to do then? Just sit here waiting for death?"

 

"Just sit by the fire, I'm sure we won't be here long enough to worry about hypothermia or frost bite. The Flash and your friends are probably already working on getting us out of here." She tells him unnaturally calm.

  

He doesn't like it but he moves across the small cottage and sits down on the floor next to her. The shimmer of his blood drying dark brown on the frosty blue fabric pulls his eyes away from the flames. Her hands have been wiped clean mostly, but the hem of her dress tells him she had used it as a rag. There is still blood under her fingernails and streaks missed by her cleaning.

  

There are rags around him that he realise used to be his shirt on the floor around them. Bloody scissors and needle and thread on the floor by the fire.

 

He runs a hand across his stomach, her tight and even handy work. She had small but steady surgeons hands and it showed in her stitch work.

  

She leans forward and moves his hand away. Cold fingers wrapped around his wrist.

 

"Leave it alone. We don't have enough thread to close you back up if you pull your stitches." It was weird how cool and burning her touch was, how unknown and mysterious she felt when a couple hours ago she had been bent over him swearing as she tried to put him back together.

 

This is what he got for playing the hero. He was a villain, he'd always been one, he'd always be one. He shouldn't have let Len talk him into fighting a man that controlled the fucking weather.

  

What kind of bullshit was that?

 

She takes her hand away from his wrist, and he can feel the cold band of her touch linger. 

 

He stretches out a leg on the far side of her and uses it to corral her closer to the fire. She felt like ice. That dress was too thin and too damp with his blood to possibly be keeping her warm. Mick pulls his jacket carefully off and leans across the small space in front of the hearth and wraps it around her shoulders.

  

"What are you doing? You'll freeze." She hisses pulling the jacket away and leaning into him to pull the jacket back over him. She's close to him and he can smell her skin, winter, faint lavender, and the strong iron scent of his blood. It's a surprisingly wonderful smell and he breathes it in too deeply. He puts his hands over hers and it keeps her close to him. He can feel the heat in his body leech away into her cold frame.

  

"I thought we wouldn't be here long enough to worry about that?" 

 

"That's an estimate based on you still wearing clothes." She narrows her eyes at him and pulls away. 

  

He lets her. Watching her carefully as she sits across from him, the fire to her right, his leg to the left keeping her as close to the hearth as he can without burning her.

 

"Thank you." He tells her quietly and it causes her to look up at him, eyes narrow like she suspects some sort of trick. 

 

"For?" 

 

He carefully puts a hand to her stitching and she makes an unhappy noise in the back of her throat until he pulls his hand away.

  

"What? Was I supposed to do? Let you die?" 

 

Maybe not die, but he certainly hadn't expected her to drag his half conscious ass into a nearby cottage and perform surgery with nothing but some sewing kit she'd found. 

 

"Just take the gratitude Snow, I don't say thank you often." He tries to pull back the growl but she just meets it with icy eyes.

  

He started back into her icy gaze and wondered why she had put herself on the line like that, for him. For The Flash sure, Cisco, maybe even Lisa but him? It made no sense.

 

He had seen her during the fight, felt her eyes on him and when he looked at her she had stared back at like him like it should have meant something. He was burning the world down around them but she had looked at him in a way that had felt all together perfect and so so wrong. 

 

He narrows his eyes at her and reaches out his hand to her. He rests it against her far too cool cheek and watches as she doesn't flinch or shy away from the touch, feels the way she ever so slightly presses into his hand before she remembers herself.

 

"Holy shit." He whispers pulling his hand back and he can see now just how much of a mask that icy look actually is. 

 

"What?"

  

"You _like_ me."

 

She straightens her posture, squares her shoulders and sets her jaw, "I most certainly do not."

  

"No, you do." He points at her that defensive stance was too telling and it's pulling a smirk across his face that just seems to ice her up further, "When the hell did that happen?"

 

"It didn't happen. I don't like you. In anyway." She crosses her arms over her bloody dress and turns away, starring into the fire.

 

"You ran into a battlefield to pull me to safety. You like me." 

 

"I'm a doctor. I was doing my job."

  

"You're a research biochemist Snow not some beyond boarders doctor. Don't give me that shit." He moves closer to her, his leg bent beside her, pinning her between the fire and his side, "Tell me the truth Dr. Snow." He leans in close, dangerously close, his chest hitting her crossed arms, one hand on the hot stone hearth, the other brushing away icy hair from an equally icy neck, "Is it the fire? I know about your late husband, I can see the way you look at the flames in the fireplace. Like you want to be consumed by them." His voice is lowering all on its own as his eyes trace the line of her jaw, the column of her neck, "I can make you burn if that's what you want." 

 

She turns her face back to him and there are tears in her eyes, unshed but obvious in the flickering light of the fire and he wants to pull back and lean in all at once.

  

She made no sense.

 

He hadn't even thought about her like that before. Okay that wasn't true. She was very pretty and he may have gone there a few times when he was lonely, her brutal looks, her rage was like ice, she was just so impressive, but _this_. This here wasn't right.

  

"This isn't like you said it was at all." She whispers, "You told me the first time we... You said you had always... That through all time you had only ever..." She uncrosses her arms and presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, "I didn't think it was now. I didn't think it would be like this."

 

"What are you talking about Caitlin?" He uses her name and it comes out soft, gentle, dangerously loving and when she pulls her hands away there is the ghost of a smile in her face, "What are you talking about? What did I tell you? We've barely even spoke before."

 

She shakes her head and tries to smile but its fake, "I knew that loving a time traveller was going to get complicated." She mostly tells herself but the words hit something hard in his core and pulls him, "I never know which _you_ you are." She shakes her head like she can't believe she's being so silly. She takes his hand off her and holds it, in both of hers, in her lap, "Just rest Mick, I'm sure they'll have us out soon."

  

Her hands around his feels strange, that same perfect and strange feeling that the looks she had given him on the battlefield had felt like. It hits him hard in the chest, watching her smile softly down at his hand, that he likes her too.

 

He doesn't know what the hell she's talking about with all this time travel shit but fucking Christ he wants to kiss her and the way she says his name like a lover, she, she didn't just like him, she was fucking in love with him.

  

He could pick her scream out in the fight as he fell, something high and feral and just desperate.

 

"Caitlin..." He whispers her name and when she looks up at him calmly he wonders what she sees because the smile in her face shifts from soft and resigned to something brighter than the flickering low flames beside them. 

 

"There you are." She whispers as he leans forward to press his mouth against hers. He's gentle, nervous, as he leans into her but she kisses back like they've kissed a thousand times, she kisses him like he's home, wrapping her arms his neck.

  

It's the first time he's kissed her and if this time travel shit is right this could just be one of many to her and there is something so strange about that, unnerving. He bites at her and her fingers grab him tightly opening her mouth to allow him to deepen it.

  

It was so strange that she kissed him like a lover when he was kissing her back like she was unexplored territory. She makes soft beautiful noises in the back of her throat and it feels like she's melting, she moves like she knows what he's going to do next and he's never ever had that kind of familiarity before.

  

He presses forward and she falls easily back to the warn floor, she looks up at him like there is something so important about him and he's sure that he's never been looked at like that before in his life.

  

"Caitlin..." The way he says her name is more question than whispered reverence but she smiles up at him, cool hands on his face and neck that make him feel so much more human than he usually does.

 

"I forgive you." She tells him, carefully moving her legs so that he's settled between them.

  

"For kidnapping you?"

 

She laughs softly pulling him down to her and he is just so amazed at that sound that he doesn't even know what to do. How can she be so warm and inviting and so ice cold at the same time. It felt unnatural, just like the snow keeping them wrapped up together away from the world and he knows her secret as she smiles up at him ice cold and fully functioning.

 

She had to be a meta human.

 

She was but that smile and the soft way she touched his face leaning up to press another kiss to him, made nothing else matter but the shared breath and look in her eyes.

 

One day this would belong to him, these looks, these touches, he had earned them somehow and here she was giving in, letting him have early access because when she looked at him she saw a man he wasn't yet.

 

He twists to get a hand under her dress and a stab of pain runs through him, swear words flying out of his mouth instead of the sweet words he had been pulling together.

  

Caitlin pushes him back with a force he didn't expect and he's on his back, her legs slung over him, straddling him in what would normally be a sexy way but she's half hidden by her stained dress and glaring down at him fiercely.

  

"I told you we didn't have enough thread to put you back together!" She growls her hands alternating between slapping his away and pressing against his ripped stitches, "Fuck." She hisses and she looks around wildly and Jesus Christ he's pretty sure its impossible to be hotter. The dying fire is lighting her up and her hands are bloody, her eyes wild.

  

He realizes this must be bad, because she is looking around wildly for some saving grace. This wasn't just her being a good doctor, this was her trying to save his life, someone she loved, even if he didn't love her yet something in his chest went out to her.

 

Caitlin moves, leans over him and snatches something on the floor he can't really see. When she leans back he revises his thoughts about how hot she was because she is straddling him, bloody and wild looking and in her hand she has his heatgun.

 

"Fuck." He whispers and she looks down at him, straight into his eyes and seems to know what he's thinking or maybe she can feel it under her dress because fucking Christ. She smirks a little at him and his heart might just stop.

  

"Now is not really the time Mickey." She tells him sweetly and he's never liked that name but she can call him whatever the hell she wants.

  

She looks down at him, leans down low and she must be examining the wound. He doesn't know anything about medicine, but he trusts her.

 

She sits back up and the weight of her against him is blissfully distracting.

 

"This is going to hurt. _A lot_." She fiddles with the dials on the side of the gun and produces a small hot flame.

  

"You're not..."

 

"I'm going to cauterise the wound. We can deal with everything else once I get you back to the lab. Ready?"

 

She doesn't wait, she puts a cold hand against his bare chest and the flame against him and he screams out.

 

He passes out from the pain. His mind supplying distracting dreams of Caitlin, bloody and hot and looking at him like there was something in him worth loving.

 

_

When he wakes up he's in her lab, crisp clean bandages wrapped around him. He doesn't know what she did but he's sure there must be a scar.

 

He tries to pull the wrapping up to get a look at it but Caitlin's voice cuts harshly across the room.

 

"Don't you dare."

  

"I want to see if I'm going to scar."

  

"You do." She tells him voice instantly softer, "You love that scar. I don't know why." Her voice gets that clinical edge to it but her eyes seem oddly warm when they look at him.

 

He knows exactly why he grows to love this particular scar. He can feel the weight of her on his hips still, her hands on him, the look in her eyes like he was someone worth saving.

 

Someone to be loved.

 

He presses a hand carefully to the bandages and knows this scar will always remind him of the day he fell in love with Dr. Caitlin Snow, ice queen, love of his life.

 

He's not sure if he one hundred percent believes all this time travel shit, but he believes she loves him, that he will love her.

 

 

Days later he's in 1975 enjoying a bar fight and wonders briefly when he'll see Caitlin again and if she'll love him yet. Time travel, he could tell already, was going to be just as confusing for him.


End file.
